


He Who Tames the Stars

by Wreybies



Category: Strange Angel (TV)
Genre: Agape, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, Cults, Internal Conflict, M/M, Mysticism, Occult, Pining, S01E08 "Evocation of the Elders", Thelema
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:46:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28386465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wreybies/pseuds/Wreybies
Summary: Set during the beach scene in episode 1.08 where Jack rescues Ernest, this piece explores what Ernest was thinking while waiting for Jack, his spiritual opposite, his elemental other half."M" for language only. No smut.
Relationships: Jack Parsons/Ernest Donovan
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23





	He Who Tames the Stars

* * *

Jack Parsons - sweet fuck’n Jesus, what a beautiful man. You may not think so, and I don’t pretend to be any authority on what a beautiful man is since I ain’t never had cause to utter such words in the past, but I know what I see, and what I see is beauty made manifest and incarnate. 

It walks and is luminous. 

He’s a big fellah. Tall and fleshy, with massive blue eyes that are too young for a man of his years. Them eyes have been look’n up at the stars since he was a baby, back when life was kinder to him and his family. His poor mama still hunkers down in the servant’s quarters of the house she once lived in as the Lady of the Manor. Not anymore, though.

And Jack, well, the Great Beast done brought him to me. He ain’t remotely what I thought was coming my way, but there he was in the driveway, look’n over at me, my soul on display for him. Not that I put it there to be inspected, but there was no resisting his gaze. He pins you with them eyes and you just can’t move, can’t breathe. I mean, how _can_ you when Errol Flynn has walked off the screen and into your front yard? And he’s just standing there, waiting for me to say something, to respond, and me just as dumb and mute as a cow chewing her cud. 

I’m not sure how this is supposed to work out. Ask Maggie. She’ll tell you. She knows all about my estranged relationship with things working out. 

No clue how I got here other than the five-alarm hangover. Rye will do that to you - pick you up in a little dive bar and drop you down in some stranger’s bed, or a park bench, or the beach. The waves stroking the sand are a blanket of sound. They roll in and slip out, but it’s the sound that I notice. Like a duvet you pull over your head that muffles everything into a soft, granular hiss. It lays on you thick and heavy, embroidered with petrichor and iodine and gulls. Down at the bottom hem, some sea lions are picked out just well enough to distinguish their shapes from the rocks. This is the entry to a different realm, this sand, this water. Over there is another life, and over here, well… Just me. 

I called him from the phone booth up past the dunes like a simp. What was I supposed to do? The Great Beast doesn’t talk to me. He uses me. Jack is the king, and Susan his queen. And me? I’m just a pawn on the board and it seems like I'm playing checkers when the game is chess. 

I called him and now I feel like a fool. He’s making the future, forming it with his big rough hands that smell perpetually of gunpowder, and I don’t know where the present even is, never mind the past. 

Jack ain’t mine to beckon, but I beckoned. 

He certainly ain’t mine to have.

But I want him. 

I want him to talk _into_ me, not _to_ me, not _at_ me, not _through_ me. _Into_ me. I want to fill and be filled. I want to wear him like a suit and walk down the street like I own it - like everything I see is there because I willed it into being. 

That’s Jack. 

He didn’t come to the Agape to learn. He came to be fulfilled. He wasn’t there because of _it_. It was there because of _him_. It existed to serve his will before he himself existed. 

Time was waiting for him.

I see it when I look at him. I see the flames of his rocket. I see him blaze a line across the firmament, actinic, white-hot. He is the welder of the stars. He will knit them together and make the universe both vast and also within our reach. 

He is a god who doesn’t yet know he is a god.

I am small and mean and wiry and a drunk. And liquor ain’t the half of it. Marijuana for the haze, sometimes benzedrine for the rush, but mostly peyote for the door it opens. I don’t know the word _no_ , except when it’s said at me, which is often. But for me, nothing is forbidden other than what I forbid myself, which, as I said, ain’t much.

_"Do what thou wilt" shall be the whole of the Law._

So why do I hold back? Why do I not reach out and touch his arm, his face? Why don’t I know the taste of his kisses and the scent of his breath as it passes through my lungs? Why don’t I know how soft his mustache is under the pad of my thumb?

He said he’d come. He said he was on his way. Men lie. Men like me. But he’s not like me. He’s not like anyone. In his presence, I am humbled, and I wonder how much farther the universe expects me to smash my face into the ground.

I’ve done all that was asked of me. I gave Maggie the freedom to be the person she’s meant to be, but she don’t really want that. She wants the ties that bind. The old ties, the usual ones. Husband, wife, house, car, baby, dog, cat, ball, chain, prison. She wears slacks and drinks martinis at noon, but that’s not her will. It’s her rebellion and apparently, I am the oppressor. 

_Every man and every woman is a star._

The day is blustery. The sun is turned all the way up, but the wind has a bite to it. The water calls to me. I stand too fast and almost pass out as the blood redistributes wildly. It leaves a hum in my head that’s separate from the hangover. Sand fills my shoes. I kick them off. Ice-plants growing at the edge of the dunes squeak juicily beneath my feet. The sun burns my pale shoulders and back when my shirt hits the sand. I imagine it’s Jack’s eyes peeling back the layers of my life. I’m a book and he’s looking for the chapter that includes him.

_Every chapter, Jack. They’re all about you._

_Love is the law, love under will._

Trousers are left behind with the rest of my things. I feel the wind on my pubic hair. The sand is fiercely hot until the water's edge where it cools. The water is a shock to my feet, to my ankles, my knees. The air leaves my chest when the waves hit my manhood, my scrotum tightening with a sharp prickle, becoming a corrugated walnut shell. My cock shrivels. I keep walking, the water like molasses around my legs. It stays shallow for a surprising way. Not sure if that means the tide is in or out. 

“Ernest!” cries a gull.

“Ernest!” is the sound of two waves slapping together.

“Ernest!” someone yells from the sand.

It's Jack. There he stands in an oxblood-red shirt and black trousers, gleaming like marble against the shore. Pleasure, fear, hope, and despair are a storm in my chest.

“Jack Parsons! Come, brother, be baptized with me!” I cry. 

I am a fool. One does not preach to a god. One does not give orders to He who would tame the stars. 

He approaches slowly. He is the Great Beast. I see my path and it is Him.

* * *

__

**Author's Note:**

> There are three lines that may seem unusual. They are the core precepts of the Thelema religion of which both Ernest and Jack were adherents. 
> 
> \- _**"Do what thou wilt" shall be the whole of the Law**_ , meaning that adherents of Thelema should seek out and follow their true path, i.e. find or determine their True Will.
> 
> \- _**Love is the law, love under will**_ , i.e. the nature of the Law of Thelema is love, but love itself is subsidiary to finding and manifesting one's authentic purpose or "mission".
> 
> \- _**Every man and every woman is a star**_ , which is to say that in the 20th-century era vulgaris cosmology, it is implied by metaphor that persons doing their Wills are like stars in the universe: occupying a time and position in space, yet distinctly individual and having an independent nature largely without undue conflict with other stars.


End file.
